elliottmatt.eth

Sports fan, programming fan, fan of life, fun and games! #HailState

[pintail @pintail_xyz]

Ethereum's staking ratio just passed 1/3 for the first time. Under the current issuance curve, it won't stop until nearly all ETH is staked and solo stakers are forced out.

The window to fix this is closing - article "Ethereum’s Staking Ratio: The Tipping Point" linked below.

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

Now that ZKEVMs are at alpha stage (production-quality performance, remaining work is safety) and PeerDAS is live on mainnet, it's time to talk more about what this combination means for Ethereum.

These are not minor improvements; they are shifting Ethereum into being a fundamentally new and more powerful kind of decentralized network.

To see why, let's look at the two major types of p2p network so far:

BitTorrent (2000): huge total bandwidth, highly decentralized, no consensus

Bitcoin (2009): highly decentralized, consensus, but low bandwidth - because it’s not “distributed” in the sense of work being split up, it’s *replicated*

Now, Ethereum with PeerDAS (2025) and ZK-EVMs (expect small portions of the network using it in 2026), we get: decentralized, consensus and high bandwidth

The trilemma has been solved - not on paper, but with live running code, of which one half (data availability sampling) is *on mainnet today*, and the other half (ZK-EVMs) is *production-quality on performance today* - safety is what remains.

This was a 10-year journey (see the first commit of my original post on DAS here: https://t.co/Fa0jKFgObW , and ZK-EVM attempts started in ~2020), but it's finally here.

Over the next ~4 years, expect to see the full extent of this vision roll out:

* In 2026, large non-ZKEVM-dependent gas limit increases due to BALs and ePBS, and we'll see the first opportunities to run a ZKEVM node
* In 2026-28, gas repricings, changes to state structure, exec payload going into blobs, and other adjustments to make higher gas limits safe
* In 2027-30, large further gas limit increases, as ZKEVM becomes the primary way to validate blocks on the network

A third piece of this is distributed block building.

A long-term ideal holy grail is to get to a future where the full block is *never* constituted in one single place. This will not be necessary for a long time, but IMO it is worth striving for us at least have the capability to do that.

Even before that point, we want the meaningful authority in block building to be as distributed as possible. This can be done either in-protocol (eg. maybe we figure out how to expand FOCIL to make it a primary channel for txs), or out-of-protocol with distributed builder marketplaces. This reduces risk of centralized interference with real-time transaction inclusion, AND it creates a better environment for geographical fairness.

Onward.

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

Welcome to 2026! Milady is back.

Ethereum did a lot in 2025: gas limits increased, blob count increased, node software quality improved, zkEVMs blasted through their performance milestones, and with zkEVMs and PeerDAS ethereum made its largest step toward being a fundamentally new and more powerful kind of blockchain (more on this later)

But we have a challenge: Ethereum needs to do more to meet its own stated goals. Not the quest of "winning the next meta" regardless of whether it's tokenized dollars or political memecoins, not arbitrarily convincing people to help us fill up blockspace to make ETH ultrasound again, but the mission:

To build the world computer that serves as a central infrastructure piece of a more free and open internet.

We're building decentralized applications. Applications that run without fraud, censorship or third-party interference. Applications that pass the walkaway test: they keep running even if the original developers disappear. Applications where if you're a user, you don't even notice if Cloudflare goes down - or even if all of Cloudflare gets hacked by North Korea. Applications whose stability transcends the rise and fall of companies, ideologies and political parties. And applications that protect your privacy. All this - for finance, and also for identity, governance and whatever other civilizational infrastructure people want to build.

These properties sound radical, but we must remember that a generation ago any wallet, kitchen appliance, book or car would fulfill every single one of them. Today, all of the above are by default becoming subscription services, consigning you to permanent dependence on some centralized overlord.

Ethereum is the rebellion against this.

To achieve this, it needs to be (i) usable, and usable at scale, and (ii) actually decentralized. This needs to happen at both (a) the blockchain layer, including the software we use to run and talk to the blockchain, and (b) the application layer. All of these pieces must be improved - they are already being improved, but they must be improved more.

Fortunately, we have powerful tools on our side - but we need to apply them, and we will.

Wishing everyone an exciting 2026.

Milady.

[@aaronjmars @aaronjmars]

prediction markets will replace buying stuff.

i want someone to bring kiwis to my house.

i make a prediction market about whether someone will deliver 4 kiwis to my doorstep and load $15 into "no". a guy with an ebike sees it and picks up some kiwis.

before dropping them off on my doorstep, he bets yes. he drops them off. the market resolves to "yes" and he gets $15.

rest in peace, amazon, doordash, ubereats, etc.

[David Dao @dwddao]

Excited to share a small public good: a (still evolving) short history of mechanism design for public goods across academia and Web3. Explore the full timeline here: https://t.co/GJLc6KotIx

And let this be the last time anyone says in web3 I don’t know what "incentive compatibility" is—or why it matters 😂

[superphiz.eth @superphiz]

Congratulations @EVMavericks, I guess you're legit now!

https://t.co/Q7N8FZrJsK

[Ethereum @ethereum]

Tornado Cash (@TornadoCash) is a decentralized privacy protocol using zero-knowledge proofs to break the onchain link between sender and receiver.

It is designed to provide privacy on a public blockchain.

Ethereum is for privacy.

[Eric Migicovsky @ericmigi]

We're really proud to show off the final design for @Pebble Time 2*! It's quite a bit sleeker and imo more awesome looking than the original design for Core Time 2 we showed off in March. I hope you like it!

[dannyryan @dannyryan]

I like ethereum

It has managed to capture my attention for nearly a decade. I suspect it'll easily do so for another

Thank you to everyone that has worked on the machine that is the sum of ethereum and everything built upon it

[binji @binji_x]

ethereum has been online ten years straight with zero pauses and zero maintenance windows.

in that time:

- facebook went down for 14 hours
- aws kinesis froze for 17
- cloudflare dropped 19 datacenters
- alt L1s…well, you know.

every centralised giant blinks, they rely on on-call humans and scheduled downtime.

but ethereum never stops, not through forks, crashes, bubbles, lawsuits, hacks, wars, and every kind of drama the internet can throw at it.

and it’s not thanks to a CEO or a hotline.
it’s not because someone saved it.

it’s because we all did.

devs, stakers, researchers, users,
millions of us, scattered across the world, choosing to show up, block after block, year after year.

while banks fail, clouds go dark and servers get patched, ethereum keeps going.

we keep going.

ten years online.
forever to go.

[elliottmatt.eth @elliottmatt]

@hanni_abu Can't freaking spell "Crypto" correctly?!

[Justin Drake @drakefjustin]

The security of Bitcoin PoW is a ticking time bomb.

Bitcoin fees are at a 13-year low—less than 10 BTC/day. Despite 2016, 2020, 2024 halvings, miner revenue from fees is at a 9-year low—just 1%.

low fees → low security budget → low security

Bitcoin's security model is broken. If Bitcoin gets taken over, the fallout could take the entire crypto ecosystem with it. The systemic risks can't be ignored.

Below is the 30d moving average of daily transaction volume: now at 6.5 BTC/day, less than the past 13 years.

The story that fees will increase as a fraction of the security budget is not holding up. For a decade now BTC fees have decreased faster than issuance.

Below is the 90d moving average of the security budget contribution from fees. Fees halvened alongside issuance:

→ Mar 2016: 25 BTC/block, 1% from fees
→ Mar 2020: 12.5 BTC/block, 1% from fees
→ Apr 2022: 6.25 BTC/block, 1% from fees
→ Apr 2025: 3.125 BTC/block, still 1% from fees

Imagine fees were the only source of miner revenue today:

→ revenue drops 100x
→ hashing infra decreases 100x
→ 1% of today's infra (1 large farm) can 51% attack Bitcoin

That's the trajectory we're on. The 21M cap breaks security, it's self-destructive. It should be clear now Satoshi made an ooopsie.

As BTC price rises it gets harder to sustain high BTC-denominated fees. Today's 6.5 BTC/day may become 1 BTC/day if BTC goes to $1M or $10M.

Let's be optimistic and say BTC rises to $1M and today's 6.5 BTC/day in fees is maintained:

→ $6.5M/day in fees
→ 10% of today's security budget

Bitcoin would be a $20T asset secured by 1/10th of today's hashing infrastructure.

Today Bitcoin is secured by 20 GW—the equivalent of 10M space heaters. A 90% cut in miner revenue would bring that down to 2 GW of security—1M space heaters. For context, Texas alone produces 80 GW. There's no way a $20T asset can be secured by 2 GW.

Let's dream big and assume BTC goes to $10M per coin. Bitcoin would be a $200T asset—all fiat, all stocks, all gold; combined. Is it secure then?

→ 6.5 BTC/day is $65M/day
→ same security budget as today
→ same 20 GW of security as today

Sounds secure until you calculate the cost of attack. 1 GW of hashing infrastructure costs $1B:

→ $500M for datacenters (land, power, cooling)
→ $500M for rigs (e.g. 50M TH/s; $10 per TH/s; 20J/TH)

So what would a permanent 51% attack cost?

→ $20B for 20GW of hashing infra
→ 0.01% of BTC's hypothetical $200T marketcap

Meanwhile today there's $43B of BTC perp open interest, which is 2% of BTC's marketcap. Getting 0.01% marketcap short exposure is trivial today, and will only get easier as BTC financialises. $10M per BTC won't secure Bitcoin either.

Bottom line: Bitcoin's PoW model is not sustainable. The maths is against it. Without a fix someone will break it.

Can fees magically grow 100x? Maybe. But so far every attempt to produce transactional utility on Bitcoin has failed to drive sustained fee volume. Counterparty, Rootstock, Liquid, Lightning, Omni, Stacks, Ordinals, Babylon—you name it—only produced short-lived fee spikes.

Is BitVM a solution? Bridges relying on it can be drained by 51% attacks. One step forward, two steps back. Covenants or OP_CAT? Maybe, but highly speculative. I witnessed a STARK verified on an OP_CAT testnet—a multi-block monstrosity.

If fees don't magically grow orders of magnitude there are two candidate solutions:

1) add tail issuance, remove the 21M limit
2) switch to proof-of-stake

Both "solutions" seem to be cultural non-starters. Also tail issuance only works proactively, not after a 51% takeover.

Some suggest that Proof-of-authority (PoA) with mining pools could secure Bitcoin. What does that even mean? A multisig controlled by Foundry, AntPool, P2Pool? If you believe PoA could secure the future of money, the burden is on you to explain in detail how that would work.

Bitcoin is meant to be antifragile. Yet the elephant in the room in the room is not being addressed. We can burry our in heads in the sand. But the fundamentals are getting louder. Tick tock, next block—boom.

[Austin Griffith @austingriffith]

👀 here is where you should be deploying your apps 🚀

🙌 if not mainnet ethereum ofc!

[Austin Griffith @austingriffith]

🛠️ Building on @ethereum is easy!

🧭 Figuring out out what to build is hard!

🗺️ @ethereumfndn and dev/acc will provide better pipelines for devs to get hired and get founder support in the future...

[maria paula @MPtherealmvp]

This you?

[Roman Storm 🇺🇸 🌪️ @rstormsf]

😔💔 I’m Roman Storm. I poured my soul into Tornado Cash—software that’s non-custodial, trustless, permissionless, immutable, unstoppable. In 31 days, I face trial. The DOJ wants to bury DeFi, saying I should’ve controlled it, added KYC, never built it. SDNY is trying to crush me, blocking every expert witness. If I lose, DeFi dies with me. The dream of financial freedom, the code I believed in—it all fades into darkness. I’m fighting, but the weight is unbearable. This isn’t just my end; it’s ours. 🪦 #SaveDeFi #TornadoCash

https://t.co/IYqXdqjQ4r

[Ethereum @ethereum]

Pectra is live on Ethereum mainnet!

- Smart account wallet UX features now active
- L2 scaling data storage blobs increased by 2x
- Validator UX improvements live

Community members will continue to monitor for any issues over the next 24 hours.

[Ethereum @ethereum]

upgrade in progress . . .

activating Pectra @ epoch 364032 // 10:05:11 UTC

[stakersunion.eth @stakersunion]

StakeCat's list of solo-stakers is the most comprehensive and best-maintained in the community. It's so good that the Stakers Union uses it to automatically verify eligibility for prospective members!

We're super excited to share that solo-stakers who are not currently on the @Stake_Cat list can apply for membership and get added!

Learn more about our verification process: https://t.co/QzDRQmO6CB

Appeals: https://t.co/Fj5NQqkNdH

Apply to Join: https://t.co/jylIXG3Dv1

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

Why I support privacy:

https://t.co/4Um4QdnTqG